My 20 Favorite Things of the Decade

Instead of doing a traditional countdown of the best films of the decade (for that you can see the Question of the Day feature that was posted in the last week or so) I thought I would change it up and just list some of the things that made me extremely happy the past 10 years. I think people may be a bit "listed" out right now, and I like doing something more personal than just listing movies I loved…which is an exercise I take pleasure in, but for that just look at my top 10 lists for the past 10 years (check the labels on the left side of the blog). So here are my 20 favorite things (movies, sports moments, music, books, etc.) of the past 10 years…

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My Favorite Books of the Decade

I hate choosing favorites. Especially when it comes to books…which is why I am just going to list these things alphabetically. I hope you'll ask about some of these choices in the comments section; I also hope that you will pick some of these titles up if you haven't read them. There are some great authors here, but before I reveal the list there is one caveat: my tastes unabashedly lean towards the British writers. Sorry Chuck Palahniuk and Don DeLillo fans (although I do love White Noise and Mao II…I just didn't think DeLillo did anything great in the 2000's). There are a few American authors on here – my favorite being Rick Bass, the best naturalistic writer since Thoreau, and his brilliant collection of short stories The Hermit's Story – but you'll mostly find British authors who either write classically (McEwan, Coetzee and Waters) or sardonically (Barker, Amis, and Rushdie). Because my tastes lean towards the British you could say my tastes are a bit aesthete. I don't mind sounding pretentious here. I get a lot of enjoyment out of postmodern takes on classical tropes likes a WWII story (Atonement), the detective novel (The Light of Day), or just a good old fashion love story (The Powerbook).

If I had a gun to my head I guess I could name a favorite amongst these twenty selections…that would have to be Ian McEwan's Saturday…probably the finest novel about September 11^th to be written. It was also interesting to see Martin Amis go to a more classical style of storytelling with House of Meetings after his failed attempts at a September 11^th novel, Yellow Dog. Meetings is like Dostoevsky lite…which is a compliment. It's a tightly packed novel with a lot of wonderful Amisisms in it. Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown is brilliant novel, too. Rushdie floods his story with usual pop culture allusions and at the end succeeds at flipping the end of The Silence of the Lambs and making the male the hunted. It's his most impressive and his most garish novel since Midnight's Children. Finally I want to give a shout-out to Nicola Barker's fascinatingly absurd novel Darkmans. It's audacious (800+ pages) and sardonic (it reminded me of Will Self and Martin Amis), and it's not all together a success; however, it's ambition gets you through the rough patches, and by the end of the novel – a hilariously dark and irreverent flip on Bergman's moment of Death playing chess (for Barker Death is more of a jokester, and instead of chess he flips a coin) – I found myself to have laughed more than I did groan throughout the novel. It's really one of the standout works of the last ten years.

Onto the list…

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Read This Book: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

[In an attempt to get book discussion going on this blog I am installing a new feature that will appear every now and then (or whenever I finish a book). Consider this my makeshift book club, and I hope all of you will join in the fun.]

In what I hope to be a feature that makes a somewhat normal appearance on the blog I would like to recommend to all of you Sarah Waters' newest novel The Little Stranger. Perhaps no other author writing today is doing the whole 'history and mystery' thing better than her. Sadly these tropes have become a bit antiquated and gone by the wayside, but there's something refreshingly classical about her approach to writing. She reminds me of another modern master, Ian McEwan, who also specializes in very literary, yet easily consumable mysteries that swirl around historical events (his Amsterdam won the Booker Prize and Atonement made him a household name).

Waters' newest novel (part of a loose trilogy that also include Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith) is a ghost story on the surface; however, beneath it all are themes as elusive as the phantasms that exist within the pages. The novel is really about how people can create their own nightmares...their own 'ghost stories' if you will. The novel is breezy read that reminds the reader of a more formal, classical novelist like the Bronte's. Her The Night Watch was one of the best novels of 2007, manipulating time and narrative structure to tell a poignant tale revolving around the 1941 blitz and the bombings that took place in 1944. She isn't as playful in her newest novel, and that's okay. I do find it interesting that she has been shortlisted for the Booker prize for the second time in a row. I really like The Little Stranger (I could barely put it down), but if she wins the Booker this year it will be because they passed her up for The Night Watch. Her newest novel is a great read, though, and even though it's not 'Booker good' it's still one of the best things I've read this year.

Coming up next another novel short-listed for the Booker prize: J.M. Coetzee's Summertime (looks like I have to order it from Amazon.com UK, though, because it won't be released here in the States until Christmas eve...booo).

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10 Best Films of 2007: #7 - Atonement

If there was one film I was most looking forward to seeing this year it was definitely Atonement. Was this going to be a great film like I thought it could be? Or was this destined to be a butchered version of the Ian McEwan novel I have so much admiration for. I admit that my immediate reaction to the film was: yeah, that’s good. And I think I was disappointed in my own response to the film; I wanted to love it, and I didn’t. I was weary of the film, yes, but I was also counting down the days until I could see it for myself, and after all of that build up (mostly by me, and now by the Focus Films ad wizards pining for Awards) I feel like it’s not the film of the year I was hoping for, but it’s still an affective and beautiful looking picture.

Many people called this one of the most unfilmmable books, and I have to say I was weary of the film, wondering how in the hell they were going to translate that ending to film. But the film is impressive, in a David Lean sort of way. Which, I am not slighting the film, it is classical British filmmaking. Every shot seems to have been excruciatingly storyboarded and meticulously shot, and I found myself moved by the film (yet somewhat at an arms length) and I think part of that is McEwan. I just had finished the novel for the second time in preparation for the film and I think it was McEwan, not Joe Wright that was in my brain as I sat in the movie theater. And that's a problem when reviewing a film based on such a tremendous novel. It is not the novel I am reviewing, but the film and that is where Mr. Wright falls just a little short with his adaptation of McEwan. There are impressive shots for sure, especially one where a tired, wounded, and drunk Robbie is backlit by a scene from Brief Encounter in a movie house (there is also a scene that is straight taken from that film earlier on). Another shot that found my jaw agape was the five minute tracking shot on the shore of the beach – something that impressed me more than the shot in Children of Men – this shot takes you out of the film (much like I have always felt the details of the war does for the book) but it is impressive, no doubt.

But it left me with an almost cold admiration for it. The closest thing I can compare it to is the admiration I have for some of Kubrick's films. I am not a Kubrick fan, but I admire 2001, Paths of Glory, and most of all (his masterpiece) Barry Lyndon - which oddly enough, reminds me of Atonement. That's high praise and for its set pieces and cinematography alone, Atonement is one of the best films of the year.

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